Identities in Flux

Niyi Afolabi

Description

Drawing on historical and cultural approaches to race relations, Identities in Flux examines iconic Afro-Brazilian figures and theorizes how they have been appropriated to either support or contest a utopian vision of multiculturalism. Zumbi dos Palmares, the leader of a runaway slave community in the seventeenth century, is shown not as an anti-Brazilian rebel but as a symbol of Black consciousness and anti-colonial resistance. Xica da Silva, an eighteenth-century mixed-race enslaved woman who "married" her master and has been seen as a licentious mulatta, questions gendered stereotypes of so-called racial democracy. Manuel Querino, whose ethnographic studies have been ignored and virtually unknown for much of the twentieth century, is put on par with more widely known African American trailblazers such as W. E. B. Du Bois. Niyi Afolabi draws out the intermingling influences of Yoruba and Classical Greek mythologies in Brazilian representations of the carnivalesque Black Orpheus, while his analysis of City of God focuses on the growing centrality of the ghetto, or favela, as a theme and producer of culture in the early twenty-first-century Brazilian urban scene. Ultimately, Afolabi argues, the identities of these figures are not fixed, but rather inhabit a fluid terrain of ideological and political struggle, challenging the idealistic notion that racial hybridity has eliminated racial discrimination in Brazil.
Preface
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Afro-Brazilian Diaspora: From Slavery to Migrating Identities

2. Zumbi dos Palmares: Relocating History, Film, and Print

3. Xica da Silva: Sexualized and Miscegenated Body Politics

4. Manuel Querino: African Contributions to Brazil

5. Jorge Amado's Poetic License: Fictionalizing History

6. Black Orpheus: Regeneration of Greco-Yoruba Mythologies

7. City of God: The Ghettoization of Violence

Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Cultures
• Caribbean
• History of the Americas
• Latin America
• South America
• Indigenous peoples
• Ethnic studies
• América del Sur
• Latin American

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781438482514
• Langue: English

Extrait

Identities in Flux
SUNY series, Afro-Latinx Futures

Vanessa K. Valdés, editor
Identities in Flux
Race, Migration, and Citizenship in Brazil
NIYI AFOLABI
Cover image courtesy of Photofest
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Afolabi, Niyi, author.
Title: Identities in flux : race, migration, and citizenship in Brazil / Niyi Afolabi.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Series: SUNY series, Afro-Latinx futures | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020024651 | ISBN 9781438482491 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438482514 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Brazilian literature—History and criticism. | Blacks in literature. | Race in literature. | Blacks—Race identity—Brazil. | Brazil—Civilization—African influences.
Classification: LCC PQ9523.B57 A46 2021 | DDC 869.09/981—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024651
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my beloved father, J.O. Afolabi On my silver jubilee, you departed. Gratitude for the vision, Three decades after, In peace, you rest.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Afro-Brazilian Diaspora: From Slavery to Migrating Identities
Chapter 2 Zumbi dos Palmares: Relocating History, Film, and Print
Chapter 3 Xica da Silva: Sexualized and Miscegenated Body Politics
Chapter 4 Manuel Querino: African Contributions to Brazil
Chapter 5 Jorge Amado’s Poetic License: Fictionalizing History
Chapter 6 Black Orpheus: Regeneration of Greco-Yoruba Mythologies
Chapter 7 City of God: The Ghettoization of Violence
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
After close to forty years of interacting with Brazil, intellectually, socially, culturally, and spiritually, in part due to my own African connections with this Southern American country, I was compelled to ask myself a few cogent questions, only a decade ago: (1) Why is Brazil so intrinsically connected to Africa, especially given its more visible Yoruba spiritual rootedness? (2) What could be teased out, among its historical, literary, and cultural manifestations as defining “archetypal” icons or subjects that constitute foundational essences for Afro-Brazilian identities? (3) How exhaustive are these predominant elements, and why are what is left out not a deliberate omission but a consequence of limited space and time for inclusion? (4) Why are other vital forces of the culinary, the architectural, the carnivalesque, the sacred, even the popular and the profane all conflated within cultural and historical production? And (5), why are other intellectual and archival agencies so extensive that one book cannot possibly exhaust all the daunting possibilities? Since answers are often embedded within questions, let me suggest that my effort here, which one of the anonymous readers delightfully qualified as “ambitious,” has barely scratched the surface of an expansive treasure grove for future research. I am quite pleased with what I consider a major milestone in my navigation of Afro-Brazilian Studies. Afro-Brazilian identities are indeed constantly in flux due to their shifting historical and contemporary realities as they struggle to make sense of the self that is consistently oppressed by the pyramid of power and racial relations.
Acknowledgments
Many individuals and institutions have contributed to the emergence of this book. First, I thank the anonymous publisher that inadvertently spent three long years on the editorial processing of my most recent book. As fate would have it, during that long moment of suspense, I summoned the energy to focus on another book while waiting for Godot. To my surprise, and against the grain of all absurdist reality, Godot actually showed up. Unfortunately, the long wait had taken its toll and I had moved on in my placement decision. This book thus comes as a fortuitous consolation to that nagging editorial experience. Second, I thank the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies and the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin for sponsoring my field research in Brazil for the last ten years. Third, I thank the Office of the Vice President for Research for the generous publication subvention grant as well as the College of Liberal Arts for the Humanities Research Award’s consolation prize, which metaphorically “crowned” my efforts by speaking with me in double sense.
I must not forget to thank the many centers, institutes, and libraries in Brazil that opened their gates to my enquiries every time I came knocking on their doors by providing me access to invaluable information through granted interviews, archival research, material culture, as well as many memorable moments of human interactions and spirited discussions. Though all of those who helped me are too numerous to mention, I particularly thank João Reis, Florentina Souza, Jeferson Bacelar, Lande Onawale, Katuka, Lisa Castillo, Felipe Rodrigues, Maria Antonieta Antonacci, Vagner Gonçalves da Silva, João Dias, Paulo Lins, Zézé Motta, and Júnia Ferreira Furtado. Equally deserving of my gratitude is the editorial and production team at SUNY Press. As a dynamic collective, they form a meticulous force that painstakingly made the book the best it could be. I thank, among others, Vanessa K. Valdés, Rebecca Colesworthy, James Peltz, Eileen Nizer, Fran Keneston, and Matthew Phillips.
Finally, but definitely not the least, I thank the ever-present spirit of my mother, Ogboja Jengbetiele, who keeps me forging ahead in the midst of many mysterious eyes that often propel me to higher grounds in my quests for meaning.
Introduction
In Defense of Identity
Identities in Flux seeks to understand how the concepts of race, migration, and citizenship in Brazil interact in literary and cultural terrains. At the core of race relations in Brazilian culture lies the question of miscegenation or race-mixture, which has been compellingly advanced by Gilberto Freyre and powerfully critiqued by scholars (Isfahani-Hammond, 2005) as they grapple with the theoretical and social implications of violent plantation sexual relations that have challenged the seeming positive cultural hybridizations in the Americas. While slavery remains at the center of these complex relations, it also undermines the contradictions of assimilationism at the expense of racism. Though hybridity was politicized as a desirable system of racial reconciliation in which the plantation culture privileges African, indigenous, and European contact without any sense of hierarchy, the reality of colonial power relations proves otherwise. The quest for resolution of identity crisis calls for the questioning of citizenship when identities are constantly in motion and in the process inhibits collective social mobilization against racial oppressions.
When located in the context of decolonial frameworks (Maldonado-Torres, 2018), this project redeems Brazilian cultural icons who were once considered dislocated subjects of colonial power relations during enslavement and after. Similarly, these potential agents of reconstruction redefine themselves against the grain of past dehumanization and along the lines of theories articulated by Frantz Fanon (2004, 2008), Aimé Césaire (2000), Sylvia Wynter (2003), and Walter Mignolo (2000). As identities migrating from colonized spaces of damnation, inferiority, and oppression to insurgent positionalities that restore their humanity and dignity, these archetypal subjects offer new ways of envisioning regeneration of the human spirit. Migrating identities in the transnational frame are thus not fixed but shifting and political. Race relations in the specific case of Brazil are borne out of historical racial inequalities that morph from their original dislocation to a new location where a series of negotiation processes shift from assimilation and integration toward potential upward mobility. Even when communities and social movements contest the state by challenging the official representation of citizenship through a demand for equality despite difference, the ultimate sense of resolution lies in the flux of identities that is amenable to social change.
“Racial democracy,” as interrogated by scholars, has been subjected to a rigorous analysis that has further complicated our understanding of racism or its assumed lack thereof in the mythical racial paradise that Brazil is projected to be. Recent scholarship (Caldwell, 2007; Pinho, 2010; Sterling, 2012; Smith, 2016; Aidoo, 2018; Mitchell-Walthour, 2018) differs in their positionings on Brazilian racial identity yet agree on the crisis of black citizenship given the persistence of inequalities and ambiguous ethnoracial citizenship (Mitchell, 2017) that make a definitive identification impossible given the possibilities of claiming fluid identities. By virtue of a luso-tropical miscegenation thesis, racial hybridity offers a terrain of struggle in which Brazilians could claim whiteness, blackness, or race mixture